MU students' YouTube channel hits 10,000 subscribers

COLUMBIA — A group of sophomores living in a residence hall on the MU campus have been generating thousands of hits on YouTube with their video parodies.

They call themselves DaveAndDaves and post to the site a mix of comedic original songs, lampoons of
other videos and rock remixes of popular songs.

The site recently hit the 10,000
subscribers mark, and several of the Dave videos have more than 100,000
views.

One of the most popular songs on the DaveAndDaves channel is their rock cover of "Live Your Life," originally by rapper T.I. It has been viewed more than 470,000 times.

"A lot of YouTube is luck," said singer and songwriter Dave Oster. "We haven't really got too lucky yet. It has been more hard work. Hopefully we'll get lucky eventually and it will jump start."

Oster, along with Matt Kamp, Joe Rozier, David Dempsey and Missouri S&T student David Lecko, started making videos together at Mehlville High
School in St. Louis for class.

“The first rap music video we made was called ‘The Nut Rap.’ It was a project for botany. You had to pick a food, so we picked nuts,” Oster said.

Oster, Kamp and Rozier made a splash in the video world as soon as they arrived on campus last year, winning the iLife competition for their video "The Mizzou Rap." The competition puts video equipment in the hands of freshmen, challenging them to produce their own video.

The plot follows the guys as they take incoming students around campus. The musical style incorporates both rap and voice distortion, which is achieved using a program called Melodyne.

While most videos the group produces are just for fun, they have entered other contests as well, most notably the A1 "Sing for your Beef" contest. Oster submitted a song called "A1 Love" where he strums an acoustic guitar and declares his love for A1 steak sauce.

With lyrics like "When the food came out I said 'A1 please.'/He said, 'Sorry we're out. Would you care for these?'/And my heart broke into a million pieces/Because A1 was all I ever needed," the video finished in the top 10 in voting and received a $500 prize.

Oster edits with GarageBand.

"I play with things and try to switch things to rock," he said. "Then I mute the song and see if it sounds similar. I just go from there and try to make it my own.”

The drumming in the videos is electronic, even though David Lecko can actually play.

"Recording drums is such a hard process when you don’t have the equipment or the money to buy the equipment," Oster said. "So, it’s all electronic drums on the computer, but it sounds real enough.”

Not all the music is generated by computer. Both Oster and Kamp were in band in high school and play guitar in the videos.

Oster said he can write lyrics for just about any topic the group thinks of. Before the presidential election this year, Oster wrote a love song to Sarah Palin called the "Sarah-nade."

The song includes the lyrics: "Oh, Sarah Palin/You may be mostly way off track/But regardless I am here/Wanting to be your Joe Sixpack/And if you lose/We'll still never grow apart/'Cause you won my electoral heart/And that's only the start."

Comments

Dave and Matt were residents in Mark Twain last year. The first day I and the other peer advisors in the hall met them, they asked if we wanted to watch a music video they had made. They also showed us the "10 Commandments" of their room, one of which read "Thou must win the iLife competition." They set their goal in mid-August and successfully completed it by November!